Translingual practice in Indonesian popular song lyric writing: Creative multilingualism

Abstract

The multilingual turn in sociolinguistics has repositioned language as a dynamic social practice enacted across diverse settings, including second language education and non-educational creative domains. While translingual practices in educational contexts have received considerable scholarly attention, their manifestation in creative arts, particularly popular music, remains an underexplored area of inquiry. This study examines how Indonesian popular song lyricists employ diverse linguistic repertoires in their music. Ten bilingual (Indonesian–English) songs released between 2001 and 2021 were purposively selected based on genre diversity, release date, and cultural popularity. The songs were analysed through van Dijk’s (2015) Socio-Cognitive Approach (SCA), employing macro-, super-, and microstructural frameworks to examine their thematic content, translingual elements, lexical choices, and stylistic features. A structured perception survey administered to 67 audience members with varied demographic backgrounds was used to triangulate textual findings with audience reception data. The findings indicate that (1) love and romance are the dominant themes across the corpus, consistent with patterns in monolingual popular music; (2) translingual elements appear most frequently in the refrain or chorus section, signaling deliberate message emphasis by the writers; and (3) the socio-political freedoms of the post-New Order era appear to have contributed to greater artistic and linguistic experimentation in Indonesian popular music.